Death Squads in Guatemala: Even the Elite Are Not Safe

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: August 23, 1995

GUATEMALA—
Of the more than 100,000 people who have been killed in 34 years of conflict here, few have had credentials or a lineage more distinguished than Jorge Carpio Nicolle.

A first cousin of Guatemala's current President, Mr. Carpio was publisher of the newspaper El Grafico and twice a presidential candidate himself -- hardly the profile of a typical death squad victim here. Two years ago, however, a band of masked gunmen shot him to death along a dark, deserted highway.

In death as in life, Mr. Carpio's case has proved different from that of the thousands of students, trade unionists, peasants and teachers who have also died in Guatemala's brutal civil conflict. Defying death threats and apparent assassination attempts, his widow and daughter-in-law have taken their search for justice directly to the centers of power they believe first authorized and now are covering up his killing.

"I have always maintained that Jorge's death was a political assassination, an extrajudicial execution," Marta Arrivillaga de Carpio, Mr. Carpio's widow, said in an interview at her husband's office here. "We want to help knock down the wall of impunity that exists in Guatemala."

For all their political and social status and kinship with President Ramiro de Leon Carpio, however, Mr. Carpio's survivors have thus far been notably unsuccessful. Largely for that reason, the Carpio case has come to symbolize for Guatemala's 10 million people, in a way that no other killing here has, that the rule of law exists only on paper and that no one here is safe.

In the United States, much attention has been focused in recent months on the case of Efrain Bamaca, a guerrilla leader whose American wife, Jennifer Harbury, has begun an intense lobbying campaign to account for his fate after he disappeared in battle. Most Guatemalans, however, have little sympathy for Mr. Bamaca, whom they regard as a willing combatant who was himself responsible for the deaths of others.

Mr. Carpio, on the other hand, was anything but a man of arms. As leader of the National Centrist Union, he had for years been seeking a peaceful solution to his country's conflict, a course that his newspaper also urged.

In the weeks before his death, he had clashed with military leaders, refusing to endorse in his newspaper or his party an army-backed proposal to grant a sweeping retroactive amnesty to human rights abusers.

Karen Fischer de Carpio, Mr. Carpio's private secretary as well as his daughter-in-law, said she was present when Gen. Jose Domingo Garcia Samayoa, then the Minister of Defense, telephoned Mr. Carpio, demanding that he throw his party's support behind the amnesty bill. "Jorge wouldn't, the amnesty didn't pass because of him, and that is why they had him killed," she maintained.

The underlying meaning of the case was summed up by Monica Pinto, a United Nations human rights investigator, in a sentence that has become so famous here that it appears as graffiti on the walls of the capital. "If there is no justice even for the cousin of the President of Guatemala," she asked, "what can the average person expect?"

His wife at his side, Jorge Carpio was on his way to a political meeting in Chichicastenango, about 100 miles west of the capital, on the night of July 3, 1993, when the fatal ambush occurred. Three other members of his traveling party, all of them political associates, also died in the attack, which was carried out by more than a score of men in ski masks.

At first, the Guatemalan Government attributed the killings to leftist guerrillas and then, after the country's four main guerrilla groups issued an indignant denial of any involvement, shifted the blame to what were described as "common criminals" on a robbery spree. But from the start, Mr. Carpio's family rejected the official version as absurd.

Mrs. Carpio noted, for instance, that when the gunmen stopped the Mitsubishi minivan in which the group was traveling, they made it clear they were looking specifically for her 60-year-old husband. "You're Jorge Carpio, and we're going to kill you," she remembers one of them saying as soon as the car door opened. A moment later, she said, the killers pumped three bullets into him and he slumped into her arms.

Even more curiously, Ms. Fischer said, the "robbers" took only a few trinkets, like a pair of sunglasses and a pocket knife, and left behind jewelry, sound equipment and other items worth thousands of dollars. Still, within days the Guatemalan authorities announced the arrest of a notorious gang of robbers that had long been operating in the region.

From the start, the official inquiry into the killings was marked by one irregularity after another. Evidence the Carpio family handed over to Government investigators, including a bullet and footprint recovered from the vehicle, quickly disappeared, as did the reports and photographs from the victims' autopsies. The courthouse where records of the case had been kept burned down, and a firebomb was found in the ruins.

Taking advantage of their family ties, Mrs. Carpio and Ms. Fischer obtained a meeting with Ramiro de Leon Carpio, who had been Guatemala's human rights ombudsman before becoming President in June 1993. But when they met with him, they said, he merely reiterated the official version and was unswayed when they presented new evidence gathered for them by the private investigator they had hired.

"Jorge and Ramiro were more than cousins, they were raised together virtually as brothers," Mrs. Carpio said sorrowfully. "Why we are even the godparents of Ramiro's three children."

But Jorge Carpio's survivors now regard their kinsman the President as a pawn of the Guatemalan military.